Op-Ed Contributor

A Brief History of the Resistance

By JAY WINIK

Published: December 16, 2003

CHEVY CHASE, Md. — No less than Napoleon would recognize today's Iraqi battlefield. Two suicide bombers attacked Iraqi police and American forces yesterday, showing that the local insurgency that has plagued allied troops over the last six months continues despite the capture of Saddam Hussein. Indeed, the word "guerrilla" comes from the Spanish insurgency against France in the early 1800's — a campaign, seemingly without leaders or direction, that at one point tied up three of Napoleon's armies.

Of course, the United States and its allies in Iraq are not Napoleonic legions, seeking to subdue a continent as part of some grand imperial scheme; nor has a guerrilla movement engulfed the entire Iraqi nation. And the stunning capture of Mr. Hussein, the symbolic leader of the resistance, is bound to be a serious blow to the guerrillas. But in spite of this remarkable turn of events, it would be a profound mistake for American leaders to believe the worst is over in Iraq.

For starters, it defies credulity to believe that Mr. Hussein, literally holed up in the ground, has been directing the resistance. What is equally clear is that day by day, as the grim reports of more casualties and deadly bombings have arrived, these few thousand guerrillas have nonetheless been able to wreak disproportionate havoc on some 150,000 allied troops and about 100,000 Iraqi security forces — and can continue to do so. It would be a serious misjudgment to see the guerrillas simply as an anarchic street gang run amok or solely as creatures of Mr. Hussein himself.

The more logical worry is that the guerrillas have been acting quite separately from Mr. Hussein, and may be increasingly well financed and organized for the long haul. As L. Paul Bremer III, America's administrator for Iraq, said last week, there is likely to be an increase in attacks in coming months. So amid the euphoria over the news of Mr. Hussein's capture looms a larger question: what does history tell us about the prospects for success against a guerrilla insurgency committed to fighting until the bitter end? Here, the evidence is sobering.

At its essence, guerrilla warfare is how the weak make war against the strong. Insurrectionist, subversive and chaotic, its application is classic and surprisingly simple: concentrate strength against vulnerability. As most Americans know from the Vietnam experience, guerrilla warfare can work with frightening success.

But Vietnam is not the only template, and its "lessons" may be misleading. America is not the only nation that has been a victim of guerrilla conflict. An astounding number of other world powers, large and small, have been humbled by guerrilla war in the last century alone.

At the turn of the 20th century, the heavily outnumbered Boers in South Africa staved off the mightiest force in the globe, the British empire, for four long years. In the late 1950's and early 60's the Algerians used guerrilla tactics with devastating success against the far more powerful French. The Khmer Rouge employed them to come to power in Cambodia almost 30 years ago. And Palestinian forces have relied on these tactics for almost three decades against Israel.

Far from being simply a phenomenon of the most recent century, the pedigree of guerrilla warfare dates to the earliest days of human combat. Five hundred years before the coming of Jesus, the ceaseless harassment and lightening strikes of the nomadic Scythians blunted the best efforts by King Darius I of Persia to subdue them. In Spain in the second century B.C., the Romans suffered humiliating defeats and required several decades to surmount the tactics of the Lusitanians and Celtiberians. Later, in Wales, the conquering English endured some 200 years of acrimonious struggle before they prevailed. And Napoleon, of course, was forced to give up on the Iberian Peninsula only a few years after he occupied it.

In far too many guerrilla wars, the military balance becomes almost meaningless; more frightening than the actual casualties are the demoralization and exhaustion that regular armies feel, even against small numbers of terrorists and guerrillas. Deprived of the fruits of closure, of the legitimacy of victory, at what point does the occupier deem that the cruelties of a guerrilla war are no longer worth it? As a dispatch from North Africa to King Louis-Philippe of France in 1833 stated: "We have surpassed in barbarity the barbarians we came to civilize."

It is this grim specter, more than any other, that haunts the American experience in Iraq. To guard against it America need only reach into its own experience in the Civil War.

Missouri, a slave state that did not secede, was deeply divided in the war. As a result it was consumed by a nearly unbreakable cycle of revenge and retaliation: houses and towns were torched, trains and stages were attacked, steamboats came under repeated sniper fire. Enemies were not just killed, they were often mutilated. In turn, federal troops took their own bloody revenge. And the true victims, of course, were innocent civilians squeezed between the warring parties.

As one of Abraham Lincoln's generals mourned, "No policy worked; every effort poured fuel on the fire." Another put it more fearfully: guerrilla war, he said, was "the external visitation of evil." In the end, Missouri was saved not by the forces that inhabited its borders, but by Robert E. Lee's surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox and a decision by Southern fighters, including Lee, to reject pleas to continue a guerrilla conflict.

There is hope that insurgents in Iraq may make a similar decision. Even if they don't, however, there are a few examples of failed guerrilla wars. In Russia in 1773 and 1774, Catherine the Great stamped out the Pugachev rebellion before dissent swept the nation by capturing and killing Emilian Pugachev himself. In 1989, Khmer Rouge forces failed to return to power in Cambodia because after Vietnam's withdrawal they lacked widespread support and because the international community joined together to set in motion a more representative Cambodian government.

The best that American forces can now do — and it is no small task — is to provide breathing space for a viable Iraqi political process to take hold. Success in quelling this guerrilla war will depend less on the military than on politics and diplomacy. Success will come when the Iraqi people themselves, with American assistance, unite behind a new representative government and political pluralism. If they can, then over time the guerrillas will ultimately be reduced to rogue bandits.

Absent rapid reconciliation, however, determined guerrillas can still become the force on which Iraq's political future turns. It would be a sad and tragic result indeed if America freed Iraq from the clutches of a totalitarian regime and a murderous tyrant only to watch it dwindle into a failed state.

Whether the military should have prepared for guerrilla resistance before committing to war is an important debate. But it should not distract from focusing on the current challenge. Far too often, guerrilla wars have festered for years, unduly complicating the process of reconciliation. With the capture of Saddam Hussein, perhaps the United States can now defy this cruel pattern of history.